frogsplits
in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under
thigh. With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow
flashes Toft's cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded
snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall
again.)_

THE PIANOLA:

Though she's a factory lass
And wears no fancy clothes.

_(Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they
scootlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!)_

TUTTI: Encore! Bis! Bravo! Encore!

SIMON: Think of your mother's people!

STEPHEN: Dance of death.

_(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, horse, nag, steer, piglings,
Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded
ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through. Baraabum! On
nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin Steel shark stone
onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram
filling bawling gum he's a champion. Fuseblue peer from barrel rev.
evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly
with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last switchback lumbering up
and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber
bumpshire rose. Baraabum!)_

_(The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes
closed he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn
roundabout. Bright midges dance on walls. He stops dead.)_

STEPHEN: Ho!

_(Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper
grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her
face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and
lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens
her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and
confessors sing voicelessly.)_

THE CHOIR:

Liliata rutilantium te confessorum...
Iubilantium te virginum...

_(from the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester's dress
of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands gaping at
her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)_

BUCK MULLIGAN: She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the
afflicted mother. _(He upturns his eyes)_ Mercurial Malachi!

THE MOTHER: _(With the subtle smile of death's madness)_ I was once the
beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.

STEPHEN: _(Horrorstruck)_ Lemur, who are you? No. What bogeyman's trick
is t